Posted
by
Soulskill
on Wednesday May 01, 2013 @05:50PM
from the change-is-hard dept.

kkleiner writes "A recent report (PDF) from International Energy Agency delivers some dire news: despite 20 years of efforts toward clean energy and a decade of growth in renewable energy, energy production remains as 'dirty' as ever due to worldwide reliance on fossil fuels. With the global demand for energy expected to rise by 25 percent in the next 10 years, a renewed effort toward cleaner energy is desperately needed to avoid detrimental effects to the environment and public health. The report says, 'Coal technologies continue to dominate growth in power generation. This is a major reason why the amount of CO2 emitted for each unit of energy supplied has fallen by less than 1% since 1990. Thus the net impact on CO2 intensity of all changes in supply has been minimal. Coal-fired generation, which rose by an estimated 6% from 2010 to 2012, continues to grow faster than non-fossil energy sources on an absolute basis.'"

A recent cover of Investor's Business Daily, citing information from the EPA, shows a graph of air pollution in the United States over the last 20 years. It's down 60%, while population and GDP has increased.

More renewables isn't enough to provide anything more than self satisfaction. At the current rate, it would take centuries to have any significant impact, and the laws of reality will prevent it from ever providing a significant fraction. Despite extensive effort, Germany is discovering this right now, and they too are ramping coal and gas generation.

It isn't a problem of inaction, but of the wrong action, which is arguably worse. "Environmentalists" would have us continue to pour money and resources into uneconomical "solutions" which can not possibly achieve our objectives. Once all of our money and resources are spent, implementing a workable solution becomes near impossible. The problem is that they refuse to face reality and have taken the only workable solution off the table. (Or they choose to live in a different reality, where pro-environment is synonymous with anti-human, and a collapse in population is an accepted part of the "solution".)

The crucial point is that none of our current technologies are capable of providing affordable power at the scale we require. Renewables like wind and solar are hugely resource intensive, making them inherently costly both to the environment and people. They are also unreliable, and require a non-existant storage technology which is an even more difficult problem than fusion. Pumped hydro storage is the only one currently available that is even close to economical at the scale required, but it isn't universally available. We should not be pursuing an energy policy that by its very nature requires a miraculous breakthrough to succeed, and would otherwise result in spectacular failure.

Those that appreciate the scope of the problem often remark that we need a "broad mix of technologies" to meet our energy needs. That is a translation for "none of our current options are sufficient", but it is a resigned mentality, because there is no guarantee that a combination of insufficient technologies will ever be sufficient. Rather, there is good evidence that the sum total will never be sufficient in the absence of reliable baseload electricity from fossil fuels or nuclear.

Fortunately, like you said, it is not all doom and gloom. There happens to be a proven technology that would be sufficient if we developed it. It has been providing clean and cheap electricity for decades with a minimal environmental footprint, the only issue being the large (and growing) up front capital cost, and the fact that we can't build plants fast enough. While useful, conventional nuclear to which I am referring is not the solution, and will never be sufficient. Fortunately, unlike the other options, nuclear has huge unrealized potential, and with a bit of development, it could become the solution we seek.

Molten salt reactors are fundamentally different from conventional nuclear, and solve all the problems which plague solid-fueled conventional reactors, while safely operating at vastly greater efficiency. The so-called nuclear waste problem is a product of conventional reactors which are nearly 100% inefficient , and that is not an exaggeration. The fission process is such that if not completed, it produces nasty intermediate products which then contaminate the rest of the fuel, a problem severely exacerbated by only consuming a tiny fraction of the fuel, before pulling it from the reactor and adding it to the growing pile of "spent fuel". The truth though, is that "spent fuel" is almost entirely unspent, and the problem essentially disappears if we completely consume the fuel. Rather than a waste problem, it is a vast reserve of energy waiting to be tapped.

The problem isn't producing clean energy, it is doing so affordably, so that the entire world embraces it. Robert Hargraves discusses this in his book, THORIUM: energy cheaper than coal [thoriumene...ancoal.com].

You could say the same thing about ubiquitous superconductors. The technology simply isn't ready, and there is no reason to expect it will be anytime soon. Until then, like superconductors, it will be consigned to niche uses, and not displace any fossil fuel generation in the developing world, which is absolutely essential. Subsidies should be spent on developing technologies, not deploying technologies which can't succeed.

Efficiently collecting diffuse sources of energy like wind and solar is an extremely difficult challenge. Massive storage is an absolute requirement. Transmission infrastructure is also expensive, and the low capacity factors of wind and solar compound this expense. For example, using a generous 25% capacity factor for wind, it is necessary to install four times the capacity, which also requires four times the transmission infrastructure. Worse yet, all of that infrastructure must be sized to handle the full load. The economics simply don't work yet, and are far from doing so.

Even if they did, wind and solar still waste a huge amount of land and resources to harvest a relative pittance of energy, so the environmental footprint will still be much larger than any sort of nuclear, even if you want to include exclusion zones. People really don't appreciate just how much land, steel, concrete, rare earths and such are required. Nor the impact of mining and processing all those resources, to say nothing of covering vast expanses of land, and the cost of regular replacement and maintenance. It is a nightmare.

Yes, I'm suggesting that we spend a modest amount to finish the development and commercialization of molten salt reactors. There has already been extensive research at ORNL, and multiple successful test reactors. We know what these reactors are capable of, and there is very little technological uncertainty. The results are basically guaranteed if the government allows it to happen.

The difficulty of finishing the development of a well understood technology is worlds apart from the breakthroughs required f

Up until recently, the biggest polluter in terms of producing electricity was coal-fired power plants, with a long list of really harmful emissions from such power plants. With the EPA now mandating strict controls on coal-fire power plant emissions (and most of the world doing the same), these pollutants are now vastly lower, especially sulfur dioxide emissions. China has yet to impose strict emission control rules on their coal-fired power plants, but after the major debacle of HORRIBLE air pollution in t

In case anyone is wondering, they're using CO2 as the sole measurement of 'dirty,' ignoring things like sulfur, mercury, and lead, which are probably important.

The article had one fact of which I was unaware, but should be entertaining:

"The boom in natural gas availability [mainly from fracking] pushed natural gas prices down last year to a 10-year low in the US. But the drop in US demand for coal sparked a drop in the price of coal, which in turn sparked a shift in Europe where coal replaced much of the more expensive gas to supply power stations."

Sulfur dioxide you say? No, that one used to be bad because of acid rain but now I'm reading that it helped cool the planet and by reducing atmospheric levels of sulfur dioxide we've actually made global warming worse.

Then again, I remember not too long ago that diesel exhaust was horrible and we needed to get rid of diesel engines, but now I read that they're much better than gasoline engines.

So today CO2 is a civilization killer, but I'm sure there'll be a new environmental pollutant to worry about soon.

I wonder, if we got rid of all that CO2 and the global temperature dropped 10 degrees or so and a few billion people starved to death would these people that think they have all the answers step up and admit responsibility? Moot point I guess because short of cutting off electricity to a few billion people there is no real answer to the CO2 problem.

First of all, human activity hasn't changed the global temp by 10 degrees (C or F). But if we got rid of ALL the CO2 that would indeed be a bad thing. We shouldn't do that. Ideally we would just get rid of the CO2 that the industrial age introduced and allow nature to take its course. The global temp may well drop 10 degrees but it would do so over 100,000 years or so like it always has. A blink of the eye to the earth but thats 20x the age of modern society. We could adapt in that time span. Case in point:

Go find the nearest spray can. See the label which says "NO CFCS"? Chlorofluorocarbons WERE a huge concern, until we stepped up as a civilization and made the necessary changes to solve the problem. You don't hear about that problem anymore because we solved it. It didn't go away on its own. It didn't fade away like some green-fad. We recognized an environmental issue and solved it, and now the ozone layer is recovering. [dvice.com]

Similar points can be made about the other things you mentioned. Those are all bad, we are taking steps to address them, or at least figuring out if it's feasible to use a replacement or change our industrial/ag processes to minimize those pollutants. We aren't just ignoring them. And you're right, there WILL be new environmental pollutants to worry about. That doesn't invalidate the concerns over the previous ones we've identified.

Science constantly moves forward, adjusts, corrects itself when it makes mistakes. That's not a weakness, that's its chief virtue. It's the meddlesome lay people, the politicians, and the mouth breathing ignorant masses who believe you have to stick with your story, your narrative, or be deemed unprincipled or untrustworthy.

Correct! CFC's were a huge concern and the global community realized this, did something about it and now they are no longer a concern. Keyword in your sentence: WAS.

No, that one used to be bad because of acid rain but now I'm reading that it helped cool the planet and by reducing atmospheric levels of sulfur dioxide we've actually made global warming worse.

SO2 and CO2 can BOTH be bad at the same time. Think Britney Spears and Lindsey Lohan in their heydays. Britney's shaved head may have diverted attention from a paparazzi crotch shot but regardless, they both ended up in rehab/jail.

So today CO2 is a civilization killer, but I'm sure there'll be a new environmental pollutant to worry about soon.

Sarcasm aside, I honestly hope you're right about this one too because that would mean that society either resolved

The rise of coal use in Europe isn't completely due to economics. Part of it is due to Germany shutting down their nuclear plants and having to offset that electricity generation by increasing the production at their existing coal plants. They are also building (or planning to build) coal plants to help offset the loss of their nuclear plants.

"But the drop in US demand for coal sparked a drop in the price of coal, which in turn sparked a shift in Europe where coal replaced much of the more expensive gas to supply power stations."

While unfortunate, I don't think that really matters in the bigger picture. If the price of coal dropped in Europe despite the availability of U.S. coal, that implies demand is down relative to supply, meaning the total coal used by the U.S. and Europe combined is still down. If consumption were up, coal prices would

In case anyone is wondering, they're using CO2 as the sole measurement of 'dirty,' ignoring things like sulfur, mercury, and lead, which are probably important.

Exactly! Consider what was going on before cars. People used horses to move around. You know what horses do besides transporting people? They poop, and then step all over it pulverizing it. Pulverized horse poop is orders of magnitude worse than anything that can come out of a car.Consider also all the epidemics that went on for centuries without aqueducts.

Despite what environmentalist would have you believe, technology is actually making the world less and less polluted over time. Just looking at CO2 and ignoring all sorts of pollutants that it replaced, is just myopic.

An additional factor is Obama's war against the coal industry. Although his policies hurt both production and use, the heaviest burden falls on users. U.S. users find other energy sources, coal prices drop and become attractive to buyers in other countries.

Burning coal has a LOT of disadvantages, because the types of pollutants from coal burning are very long and very unhealthy. No wonder why the EPA has strict rules on coal-fired power plants, and why cleaner-burning coal from the Powder River Basin in Wyoming is in very high demand.

Longer term, the liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR), a highly-advanced nuclear reactor design that has very few of the disadvantages of solid-fuel uranium reactors, could become the main power source around the world within t

The funny thing about this story, and many stories on energy, is everyone has their favorite form of energy production, and they can all explain why all the other ones won't work. Every other method except ${FAVORED_METHOD} is too expensive.

...when your country completely discounts nuclear as the best option for an environmentally friendly energy source. Solar and wind can never be primary energy sources - they are not constant power sources. They can only supplement a steady power source. And they waste so much real estate compared to the alternative that even environmentalists don't like them, especially wind farms. I live in the shadow of one of the biggest wind farms in the United States, and it's an obnoxiously terrible use of land with comparatively little energy in return. At least now they're required to cover the cost of their eventual removal and land restoration.

Frankly I'd rather live next to a modern, safe nuclear power plant. China is appropriately proceeding with caution on the development of their next plants based on lessons learned with Fukishima (see recent slashdot posting) but they did not have a knee jerk "OMG nuclear is bad!" reaction. You fix it, you evolve the design, you move on. That's engineering. You don't go hide in a cave. Even Japan is coming round to the fact that ditching their nuclear reactors wholesale would result in an unacceptable level of energy dependence, plus they'd be burning dirty.

Nuclear is the only future in which we can have the energy abundance we have now, and do it clean. We CAN have both, unlike what some people may like to tell you.

"Japan's LNG imports soared 11.2 percent to a record high of 87.31 million tonnes in 2012, driven by an increased need for fuel to generate electricity after thenuclear sector was hit by the Fukushima crisis, government data showed on Thursday.""Japan paid a record price for crude at $114.90 per barrel last year, compared with $108.65 in 2011."

This goes to what you were saying. There may be alternative energy sources for some c

I think what will happen is that the liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR) will finally get the attention to be developed to commercial scale. The advantages of LFTR's are considerable:

1. The nuclear fuel is thorium-232, which is far more commonly available than uranium.2. The thorium fuel is dissolved in molten sodium fluoride salts, a very cheap form of fuel to make compared to the expense of assembling solid rods of uranium-235 fuel.3. Plutonium-239 from dismantled nuclear weapons and spent uranium-235

Hydro is mature. All the good locations already have hydro plants; and environmentalists are trying to get existing hydro plants torn out to benefit river wildlife, so just forget about building new hydro plants.

I'm pretty sure pumped hydro storage is in a similar situation... you need a giant reservoir uphill of a source of lots of water you can pump. Where can you build a new one of these, and will the environmentalists approve?

Using a decentralized group of electric cars as an energy-storage system is an interesting idea, but I don't think you can dependably store very much that way in the near future.

I have hopes for molten-salt solar plants, which can keep producing power after the sun goes down because the salt holds so much heat. And it would be cool if we could work out a good way to use hydrogen to store excess energy from wind or solar... but it takes a lot of electricity to strip hydrogen out of water, and hydrogen is tricky to store.

And just as you will face opposition to building more hydro, you will face opposition to building solar in the desert.

Nuclear is more expensive than wind, and is also poor at load following; you normally find nuclear needs hydro as well; because it's so expensive to build it runs flat out and then the hydro does the load following- nuclear is better for baseload.

I agree with your final statement; nuclear is indeed better for base load and not good at load-following. But probably natural gas is a better near-term way to reliably follow loads.

By all means get renewables into the mix, but don't make the same mistake the U.K. made, wasting huge sums of money on a system that doesn't work very well. (Right when demand is most heavy in winter, the wind farms stop producing. Quote: "In winter, when the most intense cold period coincides with a high pressure front, most wind turbines do not work.")

One no-brainer idea: homes and businesses in warm places (Arizona, Florida, Texas, etc.) should have solar panels on the roof. This will produce peak power during peak demand times (when everyone is running the air conditioning, the sun will be shining). This is only a tiny part of the overall energy picture, though, and will happen on its own as the cost of solar panels keeps falling.

Hydroelectric generators have to be shut down for maintenance roughly every 2 years. That wind generators have to be replaced every 12 years is not bad. Perhaps replacement is not strictly necessary and they could be repaired/rebuilt at that time? Towers and bearings and generators can be made to last hundreds of years, so apparently what is going wrong is that the blades are eroding. If that's the case, replace/rebuild/refurbish/refinish the blades once a decade - or use more durable materials.

Wind power energy cost is at grid parity right now, and is virtually CO2 neutral.

I mean, yeah sure, wind is intermittent; but it doesn't melt down, and storage can be done with hydro, pumped hydro or electric cars, or you can fill in with a bit of fossil or biofuel when the wind doesn't blow.

Pumped hydro is about 70%-80% efficient [wikipedia.org]. So wind would have to be about 0.7-0.8x grid parity for stored wind energy to be economically viable. Charging losses for an EV [evworld.com] are about 25%. So if you also factor in losses converting the EV's DC back into AC for transmission on the grid, it's going to be worse than 70% overall.

Also, yeah wind doesn't melt down. But it killed more people in 2011 than nuclear, despite providing only about 1/10th the power. The difference is that those deaths caused by wind weren't splashed all over the TV for weeks on end. It's not that wind is inherently safer. Don't get me wrong, after hydro, wind is the most viable of the renewables and I fully support its build-out. But a lot of people are basing their support on incomplete or inaccurate information, colored by what stories make jucier headlines on the evening news.

So then you should be much more concerned about coal power stations, that release vast amounts of radio active pollutants in their fly ash over the surrounding country side, ending up in everyone's food. One coal station kills more people every year with its pollution than all nukes have since the 1970s.

If all that you say about nuclear being economically unfeasible is true, then why are Chinese investing in it so heavily, specifically to build new plants? They do things all across the board, so they also do wind and solar, but nuclear still dwarfs those. Are you saying that their planners are incompetent idiots?

US civilian nuclear ate it's own children - there was intense lobbying to shut down the thorium research because it was considered to endanger the established uranium economy. You should have noticed when there were all those protests against the Iraq war that protest groups really have little or no effect in the long run, so your blame of environmentalists is just convenient bullshit to blame for the internal failure of an industry that spends an order of magnitude more on lobbying than R&D.If you wan

Not really since China is acting as a consumer of the technology and not a producer. There's the Westinghouse AP1000 based on a lot of Japanese technology and the pebble bed stuff from South Africa via Germany. The French don't seem to be interested in selling to anyone and have slowed their work anyway, Russia is trying to build their own superphoenix and get it right this time, which is going to take years before they sell it to anyone even if everything goes perfectly, so that leaves India, Germany, We

Fair enough, but a research project in the process of being set up has a few years to go, however they may have something by the time the USA (it will be government not private) wants to put up the capital to build something.Either way, I disagree with your bit about environmentalists and in this situation see them more as noisy bystanders or the dog under the table used as an excuse to cover the masters farts. Even a rocket propelled grenade fired by a protester at the superphoenix construction site didn'

Not as much as they pretend, the media pretends or those looking for somebody to blame pretends. Hence mentioning the Iraq war protests that made zero difference despite the vast numbers of people involved.

Nah, that comparison does not stand. There was not an influential, well funded anti Iraq war lobby. There is an influential, well funded environmental lobby. I do agree with you that the existing nuclear industry is ossified and resistent to change, but it goes beyond that. There is strident political, ideological resistence to nuclear on the left, and willful laziness with nuclear on the right.

There was a 28% rise in thyroid problems for Babies born after the Fukushima incident. For Chernobyl, more than 500,000 have died from Cancer related issues, and more continue to live with the effects of the Radiation. The dome that houses the Radioactive site is already crumbling. You have to look at long term effects, not the short term loss of life, which will be minimal.

According to wikipedia, cancer and radiation poisoning deaths from Chernoble is under 200. Skimming the article, it looks like long-term premature deaths should not exceed 2000, although many cases of operable thyroid cancer will have to be dealt with.

I would say the same about the engineers behind Three Mile Island. And Chernobyl. And Fukushima...

Three Mile Island? You mean that marvel of engineering in Pennsylvania in which, despite being the site of the nation's worst nuclear accident, NO ONE DIED and which did not result in a single case of cancer?

Yeah! Those dumb engineers.... Compare them to the political and environmental tards that are forcing old and obsolete nuclear power plants to keep running despite not being originally designed to run as long as they are.
I can't say much for 3rd world countries or areas near fault lines, but nuclear power is needed, desperately. Lower deaths per KW/h, by far. Cleaner by far. The only thing stopping it is this stupid stigma.

With TMI it was more what they were allowed to get away with in the final stages of construction (control and monitoring systems that wouldn't have passed spec in a fertilizer plant, but were allowed since nuclear was "clean" and "safe") that created the mess. Initial design to withstand a plane crash from the nearby airport meant that at the time it had the strongest containment vessel on the planet.With Chernobyl it was operating the plant in a way it was not designed to run, although from talking to a R

Thank you for your input Chairman Mao. China has only just recovered from your last lot of advice.China can feed itself thanks to landowners getting better at doing so with no thanks to the cultural revolution, communism or the one child policy (which wasn't universal anyway).

All countries that publicly reduced nuclear energy production, makes up the diff with coal. China, is also using more coal, but they are building a large number of nukes too, so I won't blame them.

One problem with coal, is that after you burned coal, there is still more energy in the uranium in the ash, than was produced by burning the coal. So every coal fired plant is effectively a 'dirty bomb' that pollutes our food supply with radio active ash.

You know what, you're right [plantsneedco2.org]! And I don't know why those folks in Fukushima got all upset about their nuclear reactor getting water washed all over it! I mean, the darn thing needs water to work anyway, right? Plus plants and people drink water, why were they upset that they got extra from the ocean? It's just water!

Big whoop. Warming up this damn freezer I live in is NOT being "dirty".

Right because the possibilities of water wars, refugees, failing economies, destruction of the food chain, droughts and general destabilization of the planet will have no effect on you whatsoever.

In small concentrations it is necessary for plants - but it isn't what is typically considered a "nutrient". But CO2 has a strong effect on global heating and the low concentrations confuse people who don't understand just how powerful an infrared absorber it is, or what happens when you disturb an equilibrium.

eldavojohn is totally correct when he mentions "water wars, refugees, failing economies, destruction of the food chain, droughts and general destabilization of the planet". These are all consequences of a warming planet.

Some areas will have far too much water at times - like the midwestern US that is flooding now. But then it can go into drought and crops wither like they did last year. Other areas simply suffer prolonged drought. Right now the Rio Grand has slowed to nothing but stagnant water in the southern part of New Mexico and the pecan and chile farmers are looking at big crop failures. People are already fighting over water rights in a number of areas as what is becoming a scarce resource is now the difference between a farm surviving or failing.

Scoff and deny all you want, but those of us old enough to remember the weather in the 60's and 70's know that the weather has changed and that what we are seeing now simply is not normal.

So - you're saying that the couple of decades from your youth are to be considered "normal". We're going to ignore all of the evidence that points to cyclical warming and cooling on planet earth, and use two decades to define "normal".

Does everyone forget that the Native Americans lived on this continent for untold thousand of years, before any Euros showed up? Maybe we should be asking them, "What is "normal" around here?"

You really are out of touch with reality. The Rio Grande no longer gets anywhere near Mexico. It pretty much dries up before it even leaves New Mexico. New Mexico is not in Mexico.

I was about to call BS until I looked at Google maps. And indeed the Rio Grande is dried up from west side of Brownsville to the east side of Brownsville. Probably about a 30 mile stretch. But the rest of it still has water. So still BS.

And they're all great, right? Can never have too much water washing over your cities and farmland, and the more extreme weather, drought & crop failure, species extinction, refugees and political turmoil, the better.

Embrace the climate change! The tsunami of costs to adapt will wash over us, leaving us clean of funds and fresh of heart, ready to tackle the warm new challenges that await us!

You cannot cool a nuclear reactor of any significant size with ground water. You need a proper source of water, i.e. large river or the ocean, or you have to use cooling towers. Nuclear reactors are typically less than 1/3 efficient, so for 1GW electrical output you need to get rid of 2GW of heat.

Fukushima was not placed near the ocean just because the engineers loved the view.

According to my quick calculation, 2GW is equivalent to boiling off 13 cubic feet per second of water. That's in the range of a large groundwater supply, but would be a poor use of groundwater. 13 c.f.s. is a very modest river. Compare this to the Niagara River at 100,000 c.f.s..

The SEGS, a solar thermal plant in the Mojave Desert uses ground water from a rapidly depleting aquifer to run the condensers for their generating station. The NREL report about trough-based solar thermal energy lists the SEGS's water consumption as 1000 gallons (about 3.5 tonnes in real units) evaporated per MWh generated.

You cannot cool a nuclear reactor of any significant size with ground water. You need a proper source of water, i.e. large river or the ocean, or you have to use cooling towers. Nuclear reactors are typically less than 1/3 efficient, so for 1GW electrical output you need to get rid of 2GW of heat.

Fukushima was not placed near the ocean just because the engineers loved the view.

Cooling towers use water too. Quite a lot in fact. It is the evaporation of the water that provides the bulk of the cooling effect. If you want a large-scale cooling method that uses no water*, you need to use an air-cooled condenser. There is a good diagram of a cooling tower on this page [behvac.com]. An air-cooled condenser is basically a giant car radiator (completely closed system), whereas a cooling tower has water sprays and/or ponds. They can look like the hyperboloid towers, or they can look like large radiators depending on the design.

*Some water in air-cooled condensers must be removed as "blowdown" and then made up with fresh water. Otherwise, contaminants would build up in the system. This is both a water and an efficiency loss, so it is usually as low as possible, less than 3% of the flow.

You cannot cool a nuclear reactor of any significant size with ground water. You need a proper source of water, i.e. large river or the ocean, or you have to use cooling towers. Nuclear reactors are typically less than 1/3 efficient, so for 1GW electrical output you need to get rid of 2GW of heat.

Fukushima was not placed near the ocean just because the engineers loved the view.

Cooling towers use water too. Quite a lot in fact. It is the evaporation of the water that provides the bulk of the cooling effect. If you want a large-scale cooling method that uses no water*, you need to use an air-cooled condenser. There is a good diagram of a cooling tower on this page [behvac.com]. An air-cooled condenser is basically a giant car radiator (completely closed system), whereas a cooling tower has water sprays and/or ponds. They can look like the hyperboloid towers, or they can look like large radiators depending on the design.
*Some water in air-cooled condensers must be removed as "blowdown" and then made up with fresh water. Otherwise, contaminants would build up in the system. This is both a water and an efficiency loss, so it is usually as low as possible, less than 3% of the flow.

I don't like replying to my own posts, but I forgot to add that air-cooled condensers are avoided as much as possible. They use far less water, but use a lot more power to run the air fans. And the cooling surface must be much larger which also adds cost. And the entire cycle is less efficient with an air-cooled condenser because evaporative cooling can always reach a lower temperature (Carnot-type thermodynamics). In summary, cooling towers use more water per MW, but air-cooled condensers burn more fue

If you don't use words in a commonly accepted manner, your attempts to communicate with other people will fail. So saying "Dirty means whatever I need it to mean" gets you derision, and earns you a childish reputation.

I remember a few decades ago saying the same exact asinine thing as a younger man. The only thing worse now are the women are much looser, cars are cooler, electronics are cheaper.....oh wait. Never mind the future is pretty cool.

The real problem is not that we are polluting more, the problem there are a lot more people. Get rid of half the population and you'll get rid of half the pollution. Feel free to go first to set the example.

CO2 is a colorless gas. It doesn't look, smell, taste, feel, or sound like "dirt".

I hear you, friend. CO2 isn't even the end of dirty's improper use. There are thousands of girls all over the internet that are also called "dirty", even "very dirty". But upon close inspection, most of them don't have any dirt on them at all! And you can seriously inspect everything. Whats wrong with our society?!

I've always thought that environmentalism is really just selfishness of the human species. The Earth doesn't feel or give two shits about how we treat it. It will keep on trucking until the sun explodes. So, by trying to save the environment, you really mean you want to save the environment for humans to keep living on. Possibly packing as many people on it as possible.
I say find another suitable planet and a way to get there and pillage the place.

Want more stupid bullshit? TFS only compares the past twenty years. Let us go back to my high school days.

The place is West Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Penn Power's electric plant in West Pittsburgh emitted a black column of smoke, 24/7, 365. Back in the day, it was common for housewives to do laundry at home, then hang laundry out on a clothes line. Not in West Pittsburgh, though. Clothes hanging outside would come back inside grungy on the best of days, and when the wind was blowing directly from the

OK. Let's seal you in an airtight chamber with 100% pure carbon dioxide. After all, it's "clean", so it must be good for you, right?

After all, the standard toxicology test employed by scientists puts a person in an airtight chamber with 100% pure substance. That's how we know, for example, that the state of California finds things toxic and to cause cancer.

That's not CO2 causing the smog in Beijing. Those are actual "dirty" particulates. Black Lung stuff. Burning coal in the last 50 years has become drastically better. Saying there have been no improvements is a lie. CO2 production isn't dropping but the truly poisonous stuff has largely been curtailed in the US. CO2 is a greenhouse gas not something causing Acid Rain. True it's helping warm the planet and disrupting the climate but then climate change is a fact of life on this planet. If you look at the output of a volcano such as the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines you'll see just how dirty mother nature can get. The incredible amount of sulfur dioxide pushed out by this one eruption was over 20 million tons. I think you'll see little reduction of CO2 without a massive change to another power source and currently the only viable alternative is Nuclear power but that comes with it's own problems.

At high enough concentrations, CO2 can be tasted. It forms carbonic acid in water (saliva), and it tastes... well... acidic. Before that concentration is reached CO2 can be sensed by the stinging sensation on eyes of the carbonic acid forming in tears.

either because of dramatically increase droughts or because of more frequent and more unpredictable torrential rains.

It's so sad. "Environmentalists" like you have become so obviously unable to predict the effects of what they're arguing against that their navel-gazing produces contradictory results, and they can't even see the contradiction.